Dr. Damien P. Williams: The Birthday Beast: The more data centers you have and the more traditional power you use, the more cooling you need (with attendant loses; they arent perfectly sealed systems), and the more water you will need to turn to steam to run turbines

Remember when some of y'all got real mad at me for doing some back-of-the-napkin math about how much water "AI" likely uses, in light of the fact that they refuse to release their actual numbers? Anyway.

Google’s emissions are up 48% in 5 years. Microsoft’s are up 30% since 2020. Those soaring figures are being driven by mass investments in data centers to power AI tools. Generative AI is a climate disaster and data center expansion must be stopped.

Generative AI is a climate disasterdisconnect.blog Tech companies are abandoning emissions pledges to chase AI market share

What is the water for, amenities for the people there or what?

cooling. it uses a lot of power so it generates a lot of heat

I thought so but any cooling circuit should be closed. It shouldn’t lose any water unless they’re being incredibly wasteful. Or they’re using evaporative cooling rather than heat exchange which is really lazy and irresponsible given the quantity involved.

The more data centers you have and the more traditional power you use, the more cooling you need (with attendant loses; they arent perfectly sealed systems), and the more water you will need to turn to steam to run turbines

and just the cooling systems, which usually have brochures talking up reusing grey water in a cycle and in practice take in fresh water, circle it round picking up oil and grime and then dump it again this time at 40 deg C

The steam turbines are mostly closed loop (they are very sensitive on water chemistry), but cooling is ALWAYS either open loop to a big body of water or evaporative, and the latter is what most data centers are using.

the open loop hybrid systems use an engineered fluid internal loop and then spray water for evap cooling on the external radiators. local humidity increase but idk how bad returning to the water cycle as vapor is.

No different to normal rain but if it leaves the area it was in then that’s its own problem. Half the issue with water is getting it to the right places.

in practice lotta fresh build AI data centres are run by ex-bitcoin clowns, whose attention to detail is what you'd expect

that is, you can't talk about it as if they're building perfectly spherical data centres in a vacuum

we did this interview with a local texan fighting bitcoin mines about the shit they pull these DCs can take a substantial fraction of a town's whole water supply amycastor.com/2023/10/23/t...

Texans versus bitcoin: Jackie Sawicky and the Texas Coalition Against Cryptominingamycastor.com One woman’s fight for her fellow Texans

there's a bit of a difference between e.g. Microsoft and someone like Northern for this reason

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